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BRITAIN'S SCIENCE CORRIDOR

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PLANES swooping into Heathrow International Airport on the western outskirts of this city almost always land on a huge east-west runway north of the main terminal. One of the last things passengers see before landing - if the weather permits them to see anything at all - is a six-lane expressway also running east-west. The M4.

It is no accident that Britain's major doorway to the world opens directly onto the highway corridor that is the British economy's most visible lifeline to the future. Stretching from London through to Bristol and then hopping over the Severn Bridge into south Wales, M4 has become home to a wide range of technology-based companies that Britain is counting on as a major source for the innovations that may keep the nation competitive.

The quick access to Heathrow -and the world beyond - that M4 provides has attracted many of the new companies. Britain, more than any other European nation, depends on its export trade. High-technology companies in particular must sell abroad to survive.

''England is too small a market for any high-technology product,'' said Dick Selwood, spokesman for Inmos International P.L.C., a Bristol-based microchip maker. ''To compete, you have to get out and, usually, you have to get out through Heathrow.''

The crucial role of the international airport is one way that the M4 corridor can be distinguished from Silicon Valley in California or the Route 128 ring around Boston, technology-based regions that have become everyday names to many Americans. And, for the most part, M4's development is more diffuse than its American counterparts. Moreover, in terms of technological influence and raw economic power, the M4 corridor is but a shadow of Silicon Valley or Route 128. Most of the development is not visible from the highway itself, which wends through rolling English countryside from Heathrow west.

But the corridor offers easy access to research and financial institutions in London, as well as the kind of skilled workers and entrepreneurial and engineering talent that high-technology companies need. And workers and managers alike can find easy, sometimes gracious, living along, or near, M4 - an important factor in luring, and keeping, quality people.

The diversity of M4's attractions and the various ways they blend in particular communities are the source of the corridor's wide appeal.

''One of its strengths is that it does@n't have a single center - it has nodal points that can become complementary,'' said Ray Thomas, head of the Business Administration Department at Bath University.

For the most part, these points represent brainpower rather than technical muscle. Zoning is restrictive in much of the corridor and land is expensive. Thus, lured by development grants, most hightechnology companies have located their production facilities in Ireland or Scotland, which calls the region west of Edinburgh Silicon Glen. And British manufacturers are less likely to build new plants than renovate older facilities in established industrial regions such as the Midlands.

But while the M4 corridor attracts predominantly research and development facilities - the easy access to Heathrow is a boon when a company wants to wine and dine potential foreign buyers, and show off the product - start-up companies and many small concerns do manufacture in the corridor.

''Locating here minimizes risk when you are trying to build a European research base,'' said Dick Davies, software engineering manager for the Digital Equipment Corporation in Britain, which has chosen Reading as a major development site. ''The prime location for software talent is in this part of Britain.''

One reason is that ICL P.L.C., Britain's largest homegrown computer company, grew up in nearby Bracknell. The corridor is also home to several major government research centers, including those in technology-driving fields auch as aerospace, weaponry and nuclear physics.

Farther west, the resource pool is fed by the attraction the region holds as a beautiful and convenient place to live. ''The company is here because I live here,'' said Peter White, founder of Cadre Systems Ltd., which makes electronic equipment for printers in Cirencester at the southeast edge of the Cotswolds.

Swindon, a former railroad center 80 miles from London, has been the most active recruiter of high-technology business. ''Far too many local authorities think of becoming Silicon Valley without any idea of what it is,'' said Douglas Smith, the man the town hired to attract new jobs.

One company that has chosen Swindon, America's Intel Corporation, sees resemblances between the town and Hillsboro, Ore., the community where Intel set up new operations after it had decided that Silicon Valley was becoming too crowded and expensive for comfort. ''And just as in Oregon, we are anxious to see spin-off industries spring up here,'' said David Mayes, Intel's marketing manager for northern Europe.

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The appeal of the corridor is perhaps most neatly summed up by the experience of Inmos. A Government-financed venture started in 1978 when Britain became alarmed that it was falling behind in basic semiconductor technology, Inmos resisted pressure to locate in the depressed northeast. From the beginning, the company planned to have close connections to the United States for both technical and market reasons, so access to Heathrow was critical.

In Bristol, Inmos found a redeveloping city 90 minutes down the highway from Heathrow. London itself was just 70 minutes away on the high-speed trains that British Rail had poured into the corridor to compete with the highway as it extended westward during the early 1970's. The city is the home of one major university and Bath is just 20 minutes to the east. And Bristol had the image of pleasant living that high-technology companies have found so crucial in recruiting.

So Inmos set up headquarters in a leased building in downtown Bristol. ''Bristol is associated with being 'almost there' for whole generations of British vacationers used to driving to Devon and Cornwall,'' said Michael Wright, Inmos U.K.'s director of operations. ''We moved here Jan.1, 1979, with four people and put an ad in some London papers saying 'Go West, young man.' We ran into some problems with the Equal Opportunities Commission on the wording, but there was no need to change it since we never had to run a second ad.''

''With high technology, the key thing is the people,'' agreed Ian M. Barron, Inmos U.K.'s managing director. ''It's important to locate where people want to go.''

Inmos has inadvertantly come to figure prominently in the question of where the M4 phenomenon ends. Although the M4 continues well out into Wales, most businessmen are reluctant to locate over the occasionally closed or traffic-choked bridge that spans the broad Severn estuary west of Bristol, despite financial inducements from the British Government.

Inmos had little choice. Faced with a never-formally-stated Government threat to hold up further financing if it did not build its first British assembly plant in a depressed area, Inmos determined that the Welsh city of Newport fit the bill. Thus, 30 minutes west of Bristol, in a region rife with dying coal mines and threatened steel mills, is the Inmos assembly plant, designed by Richard Rogers & Partners, the firm best known for Paris's famous modern art museum, the Pompidou Center.

Architecturally striking on the outside, the building is pure Silicon Valley on the inside, including such non-British informality as common dining rooms for executives and workers, who know each other by their first names.

The Inmos plant is sited on the front of a large tract that leaves little doubt that the concern intends to expand. ''It will be interesting to see who goes over the bridge to take advantage of development grants when the economy picks up,'' Mr. Barron mused. LURING TECHNOLOGY TO SCIENCE PARKS

LONDON Communities all over Britain have been deciding that they need a ''science park'' to attract high-technology companies. The idea has been traced to the success in the United States of North Carolina's Research Triangle and, before that, of the Stanford Universitysponsored property development projects that first housed the pioneering Silicon Valley companies.

There's no textbook definition to describe a science park. Some characteristics that appear frequently: association with a nearby university, technical center, or research institute; open, park-like surroundings on the outskirts of established communities; tax breaks; subsidized training programs; programs to recruit only hightechnology or research-oriented enterprises; room for expansion, and organized park-wide seminars or other opportunities for exchanging resources and ideas.

Some 30 science parks are operating, under construction or planned from Scotland to Southhampton. A recent Financial Times survey found that just seven actually had tenants so far.

The best known development and, at 120 acres, one of the biggest is the Cambridge Science Park, established in 1970 north of the ancient university city on land owned by Trinity College. The largest tenant is Cambridge Consultants Ltd., a research-subsidiary of Arthur D. Little, the Cambridge, Mass.-based consulting company.

The development has turned a profit, thanks to the participation of several other American companies, among them Coherent Inc., a Silicon Valley-based maker of lasers, and Bethesda Research Laboratories Inc., a Maryland-based biotechnology company.

A smaller development, founded at about the same time as the Cambridge park, is the Heriot-Watt Research Park on the Heriot-Watt University campus in Edinburgh. It has also become a role model for new science parks.

A version of this article appears in print on April 24, 1983, on Page 3003008 of the National edition with the headline: BRITAIN'S SCIENCE CORRIDOR. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe